Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

Film: Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

Stars: Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, McKenna Grace, Annie Potts, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver, Harold Ramis

Director: Jason Reitman

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Few franchises have been through it quite like Ghostbusters.  The first film, from 1984, was a runaway success, making more money than any other film that year domestically (even more than Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), and when you have money like that, a sequel is demanded.  The sequel was also a monster success, but audiences didn't like it, and despite the ongoing success of an animated series (which was the introduction of many, including myself, to the franchise, and launched the "drink of many childhoods" Ecto Cooler Hi-C), a third film never materialized until 2016, when the series was totally upended to include all-female Ghostbusters (with cameos from a plethora of stars from the original franchise, including longtime third film holdout Bill Murray).  This did relatively well, but received a sexist backlash that eventually opened the door to not a sequel of the 2016 film, but instead yet another reboot, here once again looking at the characters from the first film...though you might not have known that from the movie's bizarre marketing campaign (more on that in a second-let's discuss the film).

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Callie (Coon), a divorced mother of two whose daughter Phoebe (Grace) is a quirky science genius and her son Trevor (Wolfhard) a hormonal teenager who has a crush on a girl the second he gets to a new town.  They are living in the home of Callie's dead father whom we eventually learn is Egon Spengler (Ramis), the deceased ghostbuster who broke up the quartet years earlier because he discovered an evil force near where he lived, an evil force that will eventually destroy the planet. It begins to do just that, including bringing back Gozer the Gozerian (Olivia Wilde), one of the primary villains from the first film.  All of this happens with Phoebe learning about the original ghostbusters, and in the end getting Murray, Ackroyd, & Hudson to make appearances once again in their former glory, helping her to save the day.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife had one of the strangest marketing campaigns I've ever seen.  It's not unusual to have a trailer try to hide certain elements of the movie (it's clear, for example, that Disney has a few aces up its sleeve that are going to show up in the new Spider-Man that we won't know until the film premieres), or even to play a gotcha when you don't know what the film is about, but the movie tried everything within its power to not show its clear connection with Ghostbusters, as if it was almost ashamed that it was connected to the franchise at all.  Oscar nominee Jason Reitman doesn't usually take assignments like this (his father Ivan directed the first two movies), and I initially wondered if his off-beat humor might feel a fascinating fit for a franchise picture, and the studio just didn't know how to market it.

It turns out, they didn't know how to market it because it's a bore.  When you find a way to make Carrie Coon uninteresting and Paul Rudd charmless, you have truly hit new levels of banality.  The ending is great-seeing Murray, Ackroyd, & Hudson back on the big-screen is a joy, though I could've done without Harold Ramis making a posthumous appearance (why can't we as a society collectively agree that bringing actors back from the dead against their will is yucky?), but everything leading up to it is a mess, a boring mix of cliches & bad writing.  If this is all the franchise still has to offer, can we please give up the ghost?